200-Week Moving Average Heatmap

The chart plots Bitcoin's daily close as a series of segments, each colour-coded by the four-week percentage change of the 200-week simple moving average on that day. The 200-week MA itself is overlaid as the lower of the two darker lines — Bitcoin's slowest support line on this site, set at exactly 1,400 daily closes. The colour scale runs cold to hot: near-zero rate of change at the low end, above ten percent per four weeks.

Today the 200-week MA stands at $60,355.11. It is rising at 1.69% over the most recent four weeks, which places the network in the Cold band. Spot is 1.30× the MA. Spot refreshes a few times a day in the browser; the moving average and its rate of change refresh nightly against the full daily-close history.

The input is the daily Bitcoin USD close history (see data sources). For every day t:

200WMA(t) = mean(price[t−1399..t])
delta_4w(t) = (200WMA(t) − 200WMA(t−28)) / 200WMA(t−28) × 100

The first row with a fully-formed 200WMA lands on day 1,400 of the price history (18 May 2014); rows before that are excluded from the chart. The four-week rate of change is unitless (percentage per four weeks) and is the value the heatmap maps to colour. Thresholds at 2%, 4%, 6%, 8%, 10% bracket the historical bottoming and topping windows but are not author-canonical — PlanB's original 2019 post described the colour mapping as month-on-month percentage change without publishing exact breakpoints. Full derivation lives on the methodology page.

The window is exactly 1,400 daily closes, not 200 × (5- or 7-trading-day weeks): Bitcoin trades every day, so calendar weeks and trading weeks coincide. The rate-of-change window is four calendar weeks (28 days), again to keep the metric calendar-aligned rather than market-day-aligned.

Two readings carry the chart. The first is spot's distance from the 200-week MA — the ratio in the reading row above. Below 1.0× has historically tagged the start of an accumulation window; staying within 1.0–2.0× is the typical mid-cycle envelope; past 4× is late-cycle territory. The second is the colour band: cold means the MA itself is flat, which is structurally consistent with a bottoming phase; hot means the MA is being repriced upward fast, which is structurally consistent with late-cycle acceleration. The bands below carry the historical context for each colour.

Sampling our seven canonical cycle anchors against the rate-of-change pane shows the pattern directly. Cycle bottoms cluster in the cold band, cycle tops cluster in the warm bands; the 2024 pre-halving high in March stayed below the late-cycle extreme that 2017 and 2021 each visited, an early signal of the muted cycle the data has gone on to print. The 200-week MA values, deltas, and price-to-MA ratios in the table are computed inline from the chart's own series, not hard-coded.

The 200-week MA grows monotonically in log space across nearly the entire price history. The few exceptions — brief flatlines in mid-2015, late-2018, and mid-2022 — are themselves cycle-bottom signals. A 1,400-day window is long enough to absorb any individual quarter; the MA can only flatline if the rolling window has dropped a higher-priced run from the back end while the front end has been treading water. That co-occurrence has only happened at cycle troughs.

The MA can only accelerate to the “hot” bands when the front-end of the window is meaningfully higher than the equivalent prior-cycle prints rolling off. Late 2013 and late 2017 both saw four-week MA growth above 12%; April 2021 came close (just under 9%); November 2021 again did not quite reach the historical extreme threshold, and March 2024's pre-halving high passed without the MA's growth even reaching 6%.

One observation worth surfacing on its own: the 2024 cycle has yet to print a “hot” band. The 14 March 2024 pre-halving high registered around 4% / 4w — squarely inside the cool-mid band. The October 2025 ATH that followed printed at a rate of change in the same range. By the standard the prior three cycles set, that is a quiet cycle; an indicator that historically “flashed sell” at every cycle top has not yet flashed at this one. Whether that means the cycle has not topped or that the heatmap's calibration no longer fits the post-ETF era is the live question. We surface both readings — the price line and the underlying rate of change — so a reader can form their own view.

For a dollar-cost-averaging investor. The cold band is the DCA discount this indicator surfaces — every cycle bottom on record sits inside it. A steady weekly buy across the 2018, 2022, or any future cold-band stretch dollar-cost-averages into the mid-band of the subsequent recovery. There is nothing to time around the chart; the slowness of the 200-week MA is the feature.

For a cycle-timing trader. Two crossings carry signal. Spot crossing the 200-week MA — in either direction — has historically marked regime changes; crossings to the upside in 2015 and 2019 each preceded multi-year bull runs, and the brief crossings to the downside in 2018, 2022 each marked accumulation windows. Pair the chart with at least two of Pi Cycle, MVRV‑Z, and the Golden-Ratio Multiplier.

For a researcher. The 200WMA and its rate of change are reproducible from the daily-close history alone. Window sizing, smoothing choices, and the colour-band thresholds are documented in full on the methodology page.

The colour thresholds are not author-canonical. PlanB's January 2019 framing — “depending on the month-by-month % increase of the 200 week moving average, a colour is assigned to the price chart” (reference page) — describes the colour mapping qualitatively. It does not publish exact percentage breakpoints. Different implementations therefore disagree about where late-cycle acceleration ends and the extreme band begins. We expose the underlying rate-of-change pane so a reader can compare the same date across implementations.

Slow by construction. A 1,400-day window cannot react to a cycle change in fewer than weeks. The heatmap is a confirmation indicator, not a timing one — bottom prints sit on the cold band for months, top prints often spend multiple weeks on the warm bands before reversing. Matt Crosby summed up the broader 2024 case in late 2025: long-cycle indicators “remained untested” this cycle (Crosby, Dec 2025). The 200WMA's silence is consistent with the category-wide silence of long-window cycle indicators.

The Bitcoin cycle may no longer be a halving cycle. Lyn Alden's reframing of the Bitcoin cycle as a global-liquidity cycle rather than a halving cycle (via Crypto Briefing, 2025) implies that the long-window cycle indicators built around the four-year cadence — this one, Pi Cycle, the Golden-Ratio Multiplier — may need recalibration as ETFs and regulation reshape the demand cycle. The 200WMA's silence in 2024–2025 is a data point in that direction.

Canonical questions from Google's “People also ask” block for bitcoin 200 week moving average heatmap, answered against the data on this page.